The new teaser for the upcoming Amazon Prime Video series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was blasted on Youtube with a devastating quote from J.R.R. Tolkien, the man who created the Rings universe.
The Youtube post was swamped by nearly 8,000 comments after the teaser aired during Sunday’s Super Bowl LVI. But the predominant comment was posted thousands of times and consisted of a particular Tolkien quote.
“Evil is not able to create anything new, it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good,” the comments read over and over again in a number of languages, including Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Turkish, English, and more.
The line appears to be a paraphrase of a line in Tolkien’s weighty trilogy, which reads, “The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make; not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”
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The comment bombing of the Tolkien quote seems aimed at criticizing the Amazon series which is set to debut on Sept. 2 on the streaming service.
At more than a billion dollars in production costs, the show is shaping up as the most expensive series ever created. But the teaser has not wowed the fans, with many blasting the teaser for shoddy CGI work, and the “woke” casting for some of the characters.
The series is set in Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle Earth, which came thousands of years before the events of the famous The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. But the movies made to date have been notably free of actors from racial minorities — mostly because Tolkien meant the books to be a fantastical version of British prehistory.
Amazon Studios set out change that lack of “diversity” by casting black actors in many of the roles for the new series.
Purists, though, quickly jumped to Internet chat boards to blast the series for “woke” casting.
As of the writing of this article, the Amazon video teaser had 14,000 likes and 19,000 dislikes out of more than 2 million views.
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